What is "the cloud" in cloud computing?

"The cloud" is really just a marketing-friendly name for someone else's computers. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google run vast warehouses full of servers, cooling systems, and networking gear, and they rent out slices of that computing power over the internet. When you stream a movie or back up photos, your data travels through fiber-optic cables to one of these data centers, gets stored or processed, and the result is sent back to your screen almost instantly.

The cloud is not built into your phone: local storage is the chip inside your device, which is limited and disappears if the phone is lost or broken, whereas cloud storage survives independently. It also has nothing to do with predicting weather; that confusion comes purely from the shared name, not any shared technology.

Cloud outages can still ripple across the internet, since so many popular apps and websites now depend on the same handful of big providers behind the scenes.